Fayose: The last kicks of a dying horse

By Sunday A. Aniyi

Only recently, Mimiko revamped the ranches in Akunu, created news ones in Ose, Ondo and Ore respectively. Are there no Yoruba cattle owners? Are many of our senior civil servants and traditional leaders not cattle owners? Why is he making fetish of cattle farming as if our people are not involved in its value chain? It is apparent that he is a bigot who can’t live beyond crude ethnic bigotry. Pray, why is it that there were no crises of herders’ attacks in Ekiti before he became governor but they now exist?

Mr Ayo Fayose, the self-styled strong man of Ekiti is a man to pity at this injury time of his fading era. Having spent his entire four years on frivolous vituperations and cacophonous vainglory, the fear of life outside power has possessed him like the demons of Bacchus. He can no longer mask his desperation which has completely made a lunatic of him. The troubled governor has become a laughing stock in homes and beer parlous each time he daily appears on state television to engage in his infantile ranting. At some times he comes as a grotesque preacher sweating profusely under the chilling pang of air-conditioner; at another time, he takes over the job of journalists by side tracking the anchor to take over interview session with himself. He will direct cameramen on how to zoom his face, all of this while on live telecast. Sometimes, he will talk down on the incompetence of the anchor or obsolesce of the station’s equipment. The shameless ramble rouser does not know that the joke is on him if the broadcast equipment of a station he has serial abused, misused and personalized for his childish propagandas, is obsolete.

The latest of his many acrobatic jokers are the ‘massive promotion’ of workers and the deception to engage two thousand people into the civil service in a single swell swoop. For almost four years, he didn’t promote any workers, while he is owing salaries of workers for between eight to ten months. He has not paid leave bonus nor granted loans to anyone. And then at the specious promotion exercise, workers were asked to sing any campaign jingles of his proxy candidate. They were asked which party they would vote for. They were asked whether they would vote for Fayemi who would make them to write promotion examinations. They were asked if it were not better to be owed mountain of unpaid salaries than to be sacked. Then, the most improbable: the emperor of Ekiti pronounced that the promotion letter would be collected at the final rally of his party! Not only that, workers were instructed to submit their voter cards and their bank account details. Those who refused to provide their voter cards were issued queries. Well, it ended that those who provided their account details were paid N1, 500 to attend the rally.

Knowing the desperation of many youths to get employed, the beleaguered hedonist is going to exploit this for his selfish goal. The employment stunt was a very interesting one. The employment form does not bear civil service commission, local government service commission, judicial service commission, teaching service commission or health management board which are the statutory employers of government workers; it does not have columns for education and certificates obtained nor column for position applied for, rather, it asks for polling unit where the applicants would vote, voter card (VIN) number, and bank account details. And then, of course, applicants were to submit the forms not at the civil service commission or any government office, but at the final rally of the PDP! For coming to the rally, N2, 000 was paid into their account, with a promise of another N10, 000 if they vote the governor’s proxy candidate. It is as ridiculous as it comes. But why is Fayose so desperate to the point of being so obviously silly in his strategies?

The answer is simple. The self-assuming governor has lost the critical segments of the society. The labour leaders whom he had cowed to submission, the traditional kings that he had silenced, the Ekiti leaders home and abroad whom he had ignored and embarrassed, the peasant traders and farmers he had pauperized, the students he had overburdened with high school fees and education tax, the local contractors who got no job and those whom he gave some pittance didn’t get paid for the small job they got, are all united to end their misery. The teachers and civil servants are hungry and angry. He foolishly personalized his party and made sure people of substance were frustrated out of the party. Until recently when they weaned themselves of his exploitative greed, each senator from the state paid him a minimum of N2m monthly for giving them the tickets; house of reps members paid him N1m monthly, while the state assembly members only got paid salaries whenever he needed them to do a filthy job. He rarely held state executive meeting, consulted his appointees and hardly available in the office. He is always in the government house where he holds court like an emperor. No one stands to address him, you must be on your knees. He respects none of his commissioners and they know nothing about what goes on in their ministries. Only Fayose, the head of service and accountant general run the state, while Lere Olayinka, the low-life, crude and uncouth liar had the duty to keep the public busy with inanities while Mr Fayose loots the state dry.

Consequently, no one is ready to join him in his journey to political netherworld. He has done all the tricks in the book, yet, his situation has remained irreversibly worsened by the day. Public opinion against him keeps going southwards, while his proxy candidate is struggling to shirk off the negative image of his overbearing puppeteer but has not been able to cut an image for himself beyond that of slavish errand.
So, for Fayose everything is crumbling so fast. The fear of life after immunity has become a painful nightmare for his legacy of impunities. The fact is that he has no voice outside government, he cannot imagine himself losing out in national politics as he has virtually high-jacked the leadership of PDP in the south west. He is aware that the majority of the people in the PDP has a very low view of him but has to tolerate him for his political nuisance value. The only rope that can sustain his political relevance is that he is able to install a stooge in the state where he will continue to sustain his vainglorious epicurean lifestyle.

Apart for the Vanity Fair he called overhead bridge, Mr Fayose’s second coming will probably be remembered for the dualisation of 1.5km Ikere-Ekiti township road. For the most of uneventful tenure, he has obsessed himself with the narcissistic feel-good thought of hearing his jejune voice on national issues, many of which he is grossly ignorant of the substance. Like the empty barrel, he makes the loudest noise on national issues, even though they sound ridiculously trivial. To save his inevitable demystification, he has made crude fear mongering the corner stone of his campaign. Like he did four years ago, he has no ideas and policy to sell, it is all about chest thumbing. And having failed woefully to impress anyone, he has been selling improbable lies and instigating ethnic hatred to sustain his season of anomie in the state.

Mr Fayose and his bucolic goons have been scaring the workers he has refused to pay in spite of all efforts made by the federal government to help states to pay their workers, with the lies that Fayemi will sack them. How can a governor sack the whole workforce? He said Fayemi wanted to reduce LGA workers to 200. This is the most foolish propaganda I have heard in this electioneering. It is on record that Fayemi created 23 LCDAs that will need more hands to man them since he has promised to return them as soon as he becomes governor again. In fact, the creation of LCDA four years ago made many workers to get accelerated promotion as those who had been HODs for long became directors in the new councils. During his tenure as governor, Fayemi was publicly insulted by labour leaders, he didn’t sack them, he took them to court and they later settled out of court amicably. Fayemi didn’t sack any workers throughout his four years nor demoted anyone. Fayose has sacked many on the suspicion of political views. He regularly intimidates, harasses and punitively transfers workers who are suspected of not being loyal to his political goals.

He also regularly regale the populace of the herdsmen killing as an APC thing. Mr Fayose is generally a man with serious problem with the truth. Fayemi, Oni, Ademiluyi, Odeyemi, Adebayo and Olurin have governed this states at one time or the other from 1999, there has been no cases of herdsmen attacks until Fayose began to politicize the issue in Ekiti. He has been attacking the Fulani ethnic group and all northerners generally because of his hatred to the president. The thing came to an end when he started inciting people on radio to kill Fulani and their cows. He said on radio that people should poison water to kill cows and get armed to attack the Fulani. It was not surprising that within two weeks, a Fulani herder was killed somewhere in Oke-Ako, and three months later, innocent indigenes of the area were killed by suspected herders. It is obvious that Fayose’s indiscretion and irresponsible conduct brought inter-ethnic killings to Ekiti. For the first time we began to hear of Tivs and Fulani attacking one another. It is also obvious that his party is the main sponsors of the so-called Fulani attacks and that they do this for political end.

Fayose made an anti-grazing law which made provision for free land for cattle ranching. But today he is lying all over the place by instigating the electorate to reject cattle ranching. He also alleges that Fayemi has promised to create ranches in Ekiti when the latter never said anything about such. Besides, didn’t Awolowo as far back as 1958 create ranches in Erifun, Iworoko, Ikun, Iyemero, Auga and many places in the then Western region? Only recently, Mimiko revamped the ranches in Akunu, created news ones in Ose, Ondo and Ore respectively. Are there no Yoruba cattle owners? Are many of our senior civil servants and traditional leaders not cattle owners? Why is he making fetish of cattle farming as if our people are not involved in its value chain? It is apparent that he is a bigot who can’t live beyond crude ethnic bigotry. Pray, why is it that there were no crises of herders’ attacks in Ekiti before he became governor but they now exist? Why it is that there is no crisis of herders’ attacks in neighbouring Kwara despite huge presence of Fulani people there? Why is it that there are no cases of Fulani attacks in Ondo, Osun and Kogi states but only in Ekiti and surprisingly they began one year to election in Ekiti, just as killings started in the middle belt, a year to general election?

Fayose is also afraid of his shadows. He is being haunted by the shadow of his 2014 electoral heist. He had undue advantage then. The military submitted its command to him; he had the control of the police and other security apparatuses. The electoral commissioners were at his beck and call. Federal funds were funneled to him while the whole electoral processes were programmed to yield him a victory. Now that the table has turned against him, he is afraid he could be a victim of his venom. He can’t trust anyone to be fair because he has never been fair to anyone nor believes in fairness. Thus, as all these are not under his control, he has gone on propaganda overdrive. His sole strategy is to use fear mongering to deceive the populace so as to save him from the fear of a bleak political future. He is being stared by the inevitable journey to troubling and enervating comeuppance before the court of justice where the shadow of his malfeasances awaits the substance of his felonies. The realization of this is driving our governor crazy. He is paranoid of the days of humbling peripeteia ahead of him. But can his now well-known and ineffective stunts save him? Time will tell.

*Dr. Sunday A. Aniyi can be reached on aikuniyi@gmail.com